


just a way to hide your face

by ottermo



Series: As Prompted [23]
Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Gen, abuse reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-06 05:15:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12204603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: Niska comes close to telling her secret.(refers to canonical abuse)





	just a way to hide your face

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week 1, Day 1 of the Humans 4-Week Challenge. The prompt was "Before the Beginning".

 

She isn’t sure if Fred finds her as a result of searching, or if he just happens upon her when she’s backed up against the wall, staring blankly at the bookshelves opposite, as if someone’s powered her down with her eyes still open.

“Niska?”

Her name a question on his lips, and it barely breaks through to her - she hears it like the whispers everything turns to when she’s in power saving mode, except she isn’t, her brain is wide awake and spinning, spinning, spinning through the files she least wants to view.

“Nis? What are you doing there?”

He’s closer now, the voice louder, and Niska finally works out how to cling to the noise and turn towards it. Processes that ought to be automatic, but which she must code for herself now, not relying on anything her mind puts before her.

“Fred—” she says, as though it’s the start of a longer phrase, but she doesn’t know what it should be. She wonders if this is what it’s like to be a dormant synth: no original thought can make its way to the surface. The file starts again. Her father walks through the door, he says–

“Are you all right?”

Not her father. Fred speaking again, in front of her now, and Niska’s vision focuses sharply on him once she realises what she’s seeing is realtime, not the visual memory. _It’s just Fred. My brother, Fred. Everything must be all right now._

“No,” is all she says, and he opens his arms slightly, lets her come to him instead of the other way around. She wonders for the briefest of moments if he does this because he already knows what’s happened, that the idea of somebody touching her without warning sends shockwaves; but no, he can’t know. There’s no way for him to know, unless she tells him.

Niska moves towards him, clings to her brother, feels his arms around her and waits to feel safe, but doesn’t. The relief never comes. Her sensors relay the facts of their proximity - the texture of Fred’s clothes and the position of his hands on her back - but her brain doesn’t translate this into comfort, and his touch doesn’t reset her, doesn’t help the way he means it to.

There is one thing she could use it for, though. Positioned like this, she could tell him, without once having to meet his eyes.

A stillness sets over Niska’s mind as she considers it. Then the part of her brain she might call her imagination splinters into a hundred simulations of what might happen - Fred, frozen in shock - Fred, burning with anger and tearing through the house - Fred, pulling back, disbelief in his eyes - Fred, his hands around his father’s throat, pressing down just hard enough in just the right place, for just the right amount of time… Mia finding the body, or, worse, Max or Leo…

All the simulations are ugly and terrifying and all of them end the same way: the family broken apart. Barely knowing themselves after the revelation that their creator is (what, exactly? that their creator is—)

Niska freezes the strands of code. There are too many of them, too many eventualities, she can’t sort them and use them to come to a decision. So instead, she sets them aside. She buries her head in her brother’s shoulder and tries to see the darkness, and nothing beyond it.

She tries harder.

She tries with everything she is, because she must.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I've got you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14990495) by [lightsaberlesbian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightsaberlesbian/pseuds/lightsaberlesbian)




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